Lest They Turn Again and Rend You
by Filthy Mittens
Summary: The hardest thing about this job is not letting them inside your head. One-shot.


**A/N: AU. Damian Wayne doesn't die in "Leviathan Strikes" story arc and continues working as Robin.  
Disclaimer: All characters belong to DC Comics. I own nothing.  
**

* * *

"Sometimes in the night

I sing the songs Professor Pyg has taught me."

Momus, _Pygmalism_

. . .

"Enjoying the weather?"

Flat voice comes from the depths of Wayne Manor. Father is sitting in the armchair by the dead fireplace, elbows reclining on the armrests, legs crossed. The perfect look of a perfectly respectable gentleman, with a dash of tired haughtiness. All that he lacks is a half-empty whiskey glass with ice cubes clanking inside. Bruce Wayne the society lion – a role reserved for those he doesn't trust. I stare at his figure, indistinct in the darkness that reigns over the hours of my vigil, ignoring the cold rainwater still seeping down my face. His presence is neither startling nor unexpected.

"Very much so."

"You never found the last beacon." A slight smirk drawing up the corner of his mouth is barely visible in the greyish spot of half-light. "Planted it specifically in case of such escapades."

_My goddamn gear. Of course. _

It is now lying deep down under, at the Batcave headquarters. Eager to get rid of the costume soaked in water, sweat and rancour, I tore it off and dropped it right on the floor, waving off the twinges of conscience caused by images of a tired Pennyworth finding it. The beacon is most likely buried in the spine protector.

"Never thought you'd stoop to such things. I'm long past nursery age, and even then I didn't need brood-hen supervising."

"If you want to be treated like adult, act like one." The words come infuriatingly passionless and didactic, as if he casually fishes them out of a book of eternal truths. "For the time being I only see a teenager with no regard to the meaning of team work. You've disconnected from every single communication channel. This is not how it's done, Damian. I hoped you'd come to understand that already."

He stands up and leisurely paces the parlor, comes up to the broad window, and I have to shake off the impression of him waiting for a signal from someone unknown hiding in the impenetrably black distance, feebly dissipated by the lanterns outside. He turns around and speaks again, tone still uninterpretable.

"Apparently plunging straight into the snake pit is the only strategy you ever consider appropriate. Getting away with breaking into Arkham is fairly impressive, albeit the action itself is foolish and reckless."

"There are more sophisticated ways to get inside a building than breaking a security system that has failed of its purpose more times than months I've lived. You might as well thank me for shortening our way to the culprit. I've arranged a meeting and talked to a certain someone who knows the drill."

"You could've been reported, tracked down, even captured right there." He doesn't believe it himself, the lack of rigidity in the statement glaringly apparent.

"My investigation is not a vainglorious head hunt and you know it. I can't let this case take its course with the cops, or anyone else for that matter." I try to settle down my breath, still heavy with the lingering indignation now stirring up again. "…Let it all repeat… I just can't."

"Damian, you've got to understand something. You're vain, which is dangerous in itself. Vanity supplemented by guilt complex is a straight road to death when it comes to our work. Don't let the guilt consume you. It's what they want. The hardest thing about this job is not letting them inside your head."

_Especially those who specialize in that field of art._

"This has nothing to do with… This is the matter of broken promises. There's a price for each one, and for people of my kind debt is… unaffordable."

"Damian, you were a child. You did all that was in your power and more."

"You weren't there, you cannot know. I saw it with my own eyes, the process…"

Father strides forward, dark stripes of shadows from the house palm tree running across his form, which makes his movements look even more frighteningly fluid than usual. He stops right in front of me, his stern face hovering over mine. God knows how many times he's used this same pose to instill fear into Gotham criminals belittled by his large frame, at least those who were sane enough to recognize the threat he constituted. I hold my ground.

"I've seen things I would gladly forget. Things you are yet to see. And believe me, if I constantly scourged myself for every single person I couldn't save…"

"Spare me from this prolixity. You're not that good at fighting anxieties to lecture me on this subject."

He averts his face and grunts something unintelligible, probably complimenting Talia's upbringing techniques.

"The new warden is a lot more cooperative, especially when you find the leverage."

"The leverage was blackmail, I suppose. Drugs?"

"Heroin. Also medicine theft, certificate trade and…"

"Just like the others. All cuckoo's nests break their rulers just the same. And yet…"

"I simply guaranteed not to maim the patient."

"So what's the outcome?" He relents and returns to his usual unwavering calmness. "Did you manage to get something out of him?"

"Effortlessly."

"Is that so?" Then father does the impossible – he smiles. Ironically.

All of a sudden it's just too much. Dismissing the quip, I force my way past him and head for my bedroom.

"We've got each one of them in our database. I'm starting to work on this tomorrow. Now excuse me as I rest from my foolish labours."

"Damian!"

The door swings shut with a deafening bang. I am most certainly in an urgent need to take a shower right now – for many reasons, but the thought of staying awake for fifteen minutes longer is more loathsome than the feeling of unclean body touching the pristine sheets. I fling myself onto the bed and lie there for a while, trying to concentrate by means of staring at the ceiling, so that my mind could adopt its whitewashed blankness and fend off the memories crowding my hindsight and churning the natural flow of thoughts. However, the whiteness is too much akin to that of a cinema screen, perfectly suitable for the events to be revived frame by frame and resume drilling through my brain. Opens the backdoor of the huge old madhouse and takes me up whole, with all the pains I've got to offer as a contribution.

. . .

Rubbing the drowsy eyes with his fingers, the warden interrupts himself, realizing that his monotonous stream of memorized instructions on interaction with maximum-security patients finds no listener, and as I soundlessly walk beside him down the hallway, the lonely echo of his footsteps bounces off the walls, reverberating ridiculously loudly in these empty voluminous spaces. The irredeemable gloom of the place surpasses the most forbidding rumours disseminated by those who has to various degrees experienced its morbid hospitality first-hand. No pledge of comfort or consolation, only further descent to the hell that is dismantled psyche of a human being.

After what seems to be the seventh turn to the left we reach the dead end of a small corridor, drowned in shadow except for the narrow strip of light pouring from the crack in the door. Two uniformed men awaiting at some distance from the entrance nod slightly to the warden, baleful stares fixated on me.

"So much I can provide you with given the circumstances," he shrugs. "You've put us not in the best…"

"This will do. You may go."

He shoots me an angry glance, but only says: "I'll be outside with the guards. Any attempts of locking the door will be construed as assault."

In the room there is a middle-aged man in orange inmate uniform sitting at the screw-attached table, held in his chair by leather restraints. April is the month of unrest. He still wears his dark hair slicked back, cropped on the graying sides – hair-dye must be in short supply here. It looks like on scarce hospital food and alcohol-free diet he's lost some pounds, still notably overweight. The label on his robe proclaims him Lazlo Valentine, number 4176. After all this time it's the real name that feels fake, some figurehead alias that has nothing to do with the actual maniac I first met six years ago. He's escaped Arkham several times since then, each time his crimes progressing in gruesomeness, to the point a carousel of sanguinary visions spinned before my inner sight at the mere mention of this scum. Disfigured monstrosities that used to be men and women. Doll-faced children with perforated skulls and sutured bellies, eyes frozen forever. All of them, with hopes and dreams and plans for the future, ending up as construction sets for him to play with. And Sasha. Poor old little Sasha, wherever she may be now, and her voice when she realized I wasn't going to rescue her.

"Evening."

He raises his head, deep-set pale eyes piercing through me, letting me know I am not welcome and should know better than distracting a busy artistic mind from truly significant pursuits like gnawing at own wrists to draw blood for wall paintings, or masturbation to the fresh memories of a guard bashing him up.

He is repulsive either way, but, when he's pumped full of meds, a ghost of reason comes to haunt his gaze. The madness abandons his eyes and gives way to the calm intelligence that stands behind his invention, which asserted its horrifying brilliance by pushing its own creator over the edge of sanity, into the pits of hell he escaped at the price of degenerating into something beyond the mundane concept of psychopath.

Annoyingly slowly, his lips stretch into a ghoulish sneer.

"Birdie-boy… You came all the way to Arkham just to see me?"

"Don't flatter yourself."

I sit down in front of him and put my hands clasped onto the tacky surface, setting one more border between us. He silently studies my movements with child-like diligence, short hairy fingers fidgeting restlessly.

"Now, I'm gonna be brief and straight and I suggest you do the same, so it will be easy for both sides, and then you can go back to sleep and see your rainbow dreams, and we'll put this unpleasant discussion behind us for good. Understood?"

He heaves a deep contemplating sigh in response.

"You're right, I do see dreams. But they're not about rainbows…"

I realize he couldn't give a flying fuck about what I just said. Like hell it's going to be easy. Not for you, Damian. Not with him.

"Now you're going to listen. There's been several victims in the last two weeks…"

"They are about you, boy. And they all are painted only one color…"

_Gee, I wonder which one._ I reach across the table and grab him by the collar, making sure I jerked the fabric strong enough to hurt him, more so for complacency than for any substantial effect – the freak enjoys pain as much as kids enjoy Christmas mornings.

"You've always showed a remarkable talent for wasting my time. Can't say I appreciate it. Several victims in two weeks, young men and women, two of them spotted by local teenagers, wandering the abandoned meat plant. The others found dead. All lobotomized."

"Is this supposed to interest me?" He hisses and squirms in my grip, starting to get angry. That already is something.

"Your interest right now is to keep all the remaining tooth crowns. I heard the dentist in here leaves much to be desired." I lower my voice. "You know I'll destroy your mug before the goons outside get the slightest idea of what's going on."

The narcissistic bastard displays a semi-consenting snarl. I let go of his clothes and only then realize that I've brought my face way closer to his than I ever wanted.

"Brings back memories, doesn't it?"

He settles back and revels in his smugness, which is supposed to convince me that none of my thoughts have a chance of escaping the astute perception all maniacs seem to possess, detecting the faintest hint of disturbance, like sharks smell blood in the water from a mile away. Suppressing the urge to shatter his nose bridge, I proceed.

"One more time you digress from…"

"It's okay, baby bird, I won't… Must've cut to the quick. Force of habit, you see."

_Son of a bitch…_

"You're right, lobotomy is not the most diverting aspect. There are enough Jeffrey Dahmer wannabes in this city, especially here in Arkham."

A hardly noticeable twitch of his upper lip is more than enough to indicate that I've successfully brought him to appreciation of the fact he's not the only one with a sharp tongue.

"What really drew our attention was that all victims had their genitalia removed. And they were dressed up like dolls. Even the masks."

I observe as the information sinks in and his facial expression travels from an impudent smirk to a cold glint of maniacal fury, barely reserved by the thin walls of rationality, ready to give out any second.

"Moreover, they'd been subjected to a drug that bears a striking resemblance to one of your formulas. Our assumptions are that it is, in fact, one of the drugs you sold to human traffickers just before being placed in Arkham. I want to know who they were and if they were the only ones. Everyone you can remember. Everything."

He looks down and utters a dirty curse in Hungarian. There is a moment of silence that allows me to snatch a quick mental trip to the outside, where the world makes just as little sense, but the rain can freshen it up of all the dust and smog and filth that make it hard to breathe, hard to think. I glance at the pattern of raindrop highways running across the plexiglas window illuminated by the lights on the asylum fence, inhale the muggy air tinctured with stale odour of excrements floating from squalid toilets through the atmosphere of every floor and force myself to look at my interviewee again.

I still haven't grown accustomed to seeing his face without the mask, even though I saw it then, the very first time.

"_Hit me again! Hit me againnn!"_

The face underneath wasn't hideous like I was expecting, it was something that sank in and struck me afterwards. His features, though notably aged and pudgy, once could've been called handsome, and it made me wonder about the concept of masks. Not only those one puts on to conceal and terrify, but those we are born with to deceive. When you are an ordinary child, the world is simple: good guys and bad guys are unreservedly distinct in its black-and-white moral spectrum, and the bad guys are always ugly. I learned it a different way. I knew from the beginning of the grayscale and its challenging uncertainty, not least because I was placed right in the middle of it. And I had to choose between a bad guy in a pretty mask and a good guy in a scary mask. I chose the latter, unable to accept my mother's true face.

"I'm waiting, Pyg."

The low mutter in his native language continues, and I manage to decipher something about fucking filth and putrid spawn of a bitch. This is the first time I see him…confused. Of all aberrations, confusion was probably the only one that never dwelled the cesspool of his mutilated mind. He never had the slightest doubt in what he was doing. Lucky bastard.

In his glare I read reproach, as if I am to bear part of the blame, I am guilty of him being robbed of his masterpieces. To a certain extent, he's right. It was me who made him famous, after all, and I abhorred the sight of every headline he'd made. It once occurred to me that, over the hundreds of broken lives and defiled bodies, he might deem the nature itself as the ultimate target of his perversions. I can't help but keep reverting to this idea.

"Who they were, who they were, who…they…were… Such an impatient little shit you are, always've been. That's why we never got a proper chance to conclude our first encounter, eh?" Vile token of a friendly squint emerges and dies away as quickly. "Silly boy, why'd you have to ruin it… when it could've been sssso… good," the drawl is finished with a suggestive flicker of a short, thick tongue. The gesture ignites a chain of hazy recollections way easier than I am ready to admit, and a second is enough to get to the terminal link - olfactory associations.

_Anticeptics, blood, alcohol and that disgusting smell of a doll mask fusing with flesh._

_As he dances circles around me, flashing his scarred flabby stomach and licking his chops, a heavy mixed scent of sweat and expensive women's perfume reaches my nostrils, making me nauseous, along with the heat and the viscous buzz of 'Hysteria'. The light gets eclipsed by a pig snout shoved into my face, hot breath moistens my lips and the spiteful "oink oinkety oinkety oink" seems to come from a dark cubbyhole of the parallel universe._

"_**You promised!" **_ I promised. We're still not even. Whatever happened...

"Someone's copying your art, Pyg. And those are shitty copies. You gonna leave it like that? You think plagiarism is something to be forgiven?"

He considers my words carefully. Suddenly, his face darkens and he gives me a solemnly grim look.

"I know what you're thinking."

_Oh, really. _

"You think I fucked with your head. I didn't. I made sweet, sweet love to your little prepubescent brains, and we almost came to a climax, but you chose to be a techy brat and broke my heart that night. Not to mention my nose."

He leans forward as little as the restraints allow, and his eyelashes flutter slightly.

"I only wished to make you perfect, Robin."

"By giving me a third-rate lap dance?"

"Ah… so it left an impression, after all."

At the point I am determined to inflict a quick and permanent damage on a randomly chosen part of his skull, he evades such fate by announcing: "A couple of names I do recall."

"Enlighten me, then."

"Closer."

"What?"

"A little closer, we don't want anyone to hear."

"There _is_ no one to hear."

"I won't bite."

Not a trace of sarcasm in this matter-of-fact statement. There is a mutual understanding he's telling the truth. Something to muse about while resting on one of the couches I'm sure they keep for more tractable patients. I tear myself away from the back of my chair and shift my upper body towards him, semi-aware that the bad cop play went differently than expected. The tightening straps give a leathery creak, and once again I experience the damp sensation of warm breath against my ear. His nose brushes my skin gently while he sluggishly whispers, as if giving dictation: "Mezhenko, Hernandez, Gaziev, Tanaka. The last buyers."

The muffled percussion of drops hurtling against the window ledge fills the room for a minute, as we look straight into each other's eyes, staying hardly an inch away. Harsh light of the jittering fluorescent bars turns his pasty face a sickly shade of blue.

"Any further links?"

He shakes his head without blinking.

"You're seeing the others. I can smell them on you." He shushes me as I attempt to inquire what the fuck he is talking about, and I comply. "Promise me, my boy… that you'll find him and bring him to me, so I can show him what real art is."

"It may be more than one person…"

"Thank you."

The last thing I hear leaving the room is a quiet, but uncompromising:

"I will always be your first one, Robin."

. . .

The rain subsided a long time ago. The dawn is yet an hour ahead, and my weary body has almost given in. I bring the hands to my face to comfort the strained eyes, accidentally intake a small portion of air and realize I still smell of disinfected rooms, old medicine dust and the ill-defined scent that is so specific to Arkham Asylum – the reek of sickness, torment and decay having been interfusing for ages. In the dead silence of the nighttime mansion I start whispering to myself the free verse of four names, insensibly passing on to humming them like a cradle song that has presumably made the whole enterprise worthwhile. Seconds before sleep overtakes me I wonder if there will ever come the day I'll let my father know how much I needed him this night.


End file.
